'Do you follow me on Twitter?'
(Credit: BritneySpears.com)When we heard that pop singer Britney Spears was reinventing herself, we didn't know it involved a Twitter account.
But it's true--go to the newly revamped BritneySpears.com, and check it out. You can "Friend Britney" not only on Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and Britney's own "VIP" social network, but also Twitter. For obvious reasons, it's not actually Spears doing the Twittering. But you can still get updates like "OMG!! 7 hours until Womanizer premieres!!!!!!!" ("Womanizer" is Spears' latest hit single) and "Hey paparazzi...Rolling Stone cover rumors? Too bad you weren't inside the shoot. Brit had a great time and was dancing around the set."
Twitter isn't exactly known as a tool of the teen-pop set. The most popular accounts on the micro-blogging service, according to analytics tool Twitterholic, are currently either politicians (Barack Obama), tech industry heavyweights (Digg's Kevin Rose, blogger Robert Scoble), or news outlets of one kind or another (CNN's breaking news, the Mars Phoenix). Mainstream forays into Twitter typically deal with news and politics, like Current TV's onscreen tweet campaign.
But think about it this way: the PR teams behind many celebrities, particularly bands and singers, have built ways for fans to subscribe to text-message updates and announcements for quite some time now. A Twitter account is a cheaper and easier way of doing pretty much the same thing.
The real question: will Twitter see a big spike in traffic or new user accounts because of Britney?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that one-time pop darling Britney Spears' performance at the MTV Video Music Awards earlier this month was a total and utter trainwreck.
Chris Crocker's 'Britney manifesto'
(Credit: YouTube)But, as viral video fans soon learned, some crazy guy with a YouTube account didn't agree. He promptly put up a clip of questionable sanity in which he lay in bed, sobbing, begging us haters to "Leave Britney Alone." The video has racked up nearly 8 million views on YouTube, reaching a degree of overkill that's made many of us hope the buzz will fade away quickly or give way to some other irritating pop-culture sensation.
But don't hold your breath. That impassioned young fellow is Chris Crocker, a 19-year-old from Tennessee whose 15 minutes (seconds?) of fame just might not quite be over: Variety is reporting that a television production company, 44 Blue Productions, has inked a deal with him for a potential TV show. It's not totally serendipitous, as the entertainment site explained that Crocker has actually had a sizeable MySpace following for some time now, and that he's been on 44 Blue's radar for almost a year.
"(The show is) going to pretty much be the 'Chris Crocker experience,'" 44 Blue co-founder Rasha Drachkovitch told Variety. "We consider him a rebel character that people will find interesting. He's going to be a TV star." In other words, they're catering to the Perez Hilton demographic.
Is nothing sacred anymore?
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